


Coffin Birth

by Meicdon13



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate Reality, Attempted Abortion, Brother/Sister Incest, Death in Childbirth, F/M, Force-Feeding, Forced Pregnancy, Infanticide, Past Rape/Non-con, Physical Abuse, Rape Aftermath, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-04 05:11:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2953571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meicdon13/pseuds/Meicdon13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite Kanan’s wishes, Gonou takes her home. Now they just have to figure out how to get rid of the baby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coffin Birth

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is not for porn, but for disturbing content. This was actually originally supposed to be a happy fic, if you can believe that.
> 
> Beta by [whymzycal](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whymzycal). You can also read the fic at [Dreamwidth](http://mabangis.dreamwidth.org/114154.html#cutid1) or [Tumblr](http://mtblackbearfic.tumblr.com/post/107414921624/coffin-birth).

Gonou’s hands move without conscious thought, one of them grabbing Kanan’s wrist and twisting it.

She cries out in pain and surprise, her voice echoing in the cold basement, and drops Gonou’s knife. He catches it with his free hand and stumbles back, horrified.

Kanan had tried to kill herself. In that moment, the horror of what was growing inside her womb didn’t matter to Gonou. They just needed to escape, and he and Kanan could start over somewhere new. But if Kanan killed herself—

“Behind you!”

Gonou barely manages to block the attack. He still ends up with a long gash down his forearm, but it’s worth it to see the look on the demon’s face as he twists his knife in deeper.

He feels the demon’s blood soaking his hand, his arm, into his wound, and then a searing pain almost makes him fall to his knees. It feels like he’s being ripped apart and then reassembled, like something’s crawling through his veins, underneath his skin.

“A human who bathes … in the blood of a thousand demons …”

Gonou ignores him, just jabs the knife in even deeper, steps back when the demon finally goes limp.

The body drops to the floor with a dull thud. It’s not long before Gonou follows suit, the world tilting wildly on its axis as Kanan screams for him to focus, to open the cage before the others show up.

“Don’t worry,” he mumbles. “I killed them all.”

* * *

Moving to a new village—a new life—is surprisingly easy.

At first Kanan is furious at him, angry that he hadn’t let her kill herself. But Gonou talks some sense into her. Fetuses can be killed. Miscarriages happen all the time, for many reasons. It’s still early, it’s probably still weak.

They spend a lot of time in the bookstore. Kanan befriends the village’s midwife. They do their research quietly and efficiently, gathering and preparing materials.

There are whispers already about them; a young, new couple that came from the same direction as stories about an entire murdered demon clan. Gonou hears whispers, but he doesn’t say anything. If Kanan has heard them, neither does she.

Gonou sleeps on his side, facing Kanan, her back towards him. Even though they still share a bed, she doesn’t let him touch her. It doesn’t matter if he’s wearing all his limiters.

Kanan’s stomach is still flat, but Gonou imagines the thing growing inside of her moving around underneath her skin.

When he sleeps, he dreams of plunging his hand into Kanan’s stomach, reaching into her womb and pulling the fetus out, dreams of watching it die in his hands.

* * *

Nothing works. Not the herbs or the chemicals or the old wives’ tales. Kanan’s stomach keeps growing bigger. Gonou can’t look at her without an expression of disgust crossing his face. Kanan can’t look at him without looking like she wants to vomit.

One day, Kanan stands in front of him, hair loose around her shoulders, face hard and determined.

“Hit me,” she says.

Gonou looks at her, blinks, hands lax at his sides. “What—”

“Hit me. In the stomach.”

Gonou grabs her by the shoulders instead, pulls her close and yells, “What’s wrong with you?” He ignores the way she stiffens at his touch, the way she does ever since they moved to this village. He can’t remember the last time he held her.

“You don’t understand!” Kanan yells back at him, fire in her eyes. “I don’t want this thing in me!” She shoves him in the chest, hard enough that he’s forced to take a few steps backward. When Kanan speaks again, her voice is low. “Get it out of me, Gonou. Or I swear I’ll cut myself open and do it myself.”

Gonou takes a deep breath. When he punches her in the stomach, he’s looking into her eyes. She’s looking right back at him.

He hits her again and again, and when she falls to the floor, gasping, he kicks her. The entire time, she doesn’t ask him to stop, even when she’s barely able to breathe because of the pain, even when her entire face is red and covered in sweat and tears.

Gonou has to stop to catch his breath, his fists clenching and unclenching as he tries to process what’s happening. This is the most physical contact they’ve had for months. He meets Kanan’s eyes as she lies on the floor.

She’s looking at Gonou as if she’s willing him to suffer through this with her. Because he wouldn’t let her go, because he wouldn’t let her do what she wanted, wouldn’t let her kill herself along with the monster inside of her body.

What right did she have, asking him to just watch as she slit her own throat in front of him? To make him suffer through life alone? After everything he’d done— _after everyone he had killed, after what he turned into_ —to get to her. She couldn’t just leave him. She didn’t have the right—

Gonou kicks her again.

* * *

Kanan spends half a week in bed, recovering from Gonou’s beating. She’s covered in bruises and can’t walk without needing support, but the baby is fine.

She cries when they check and find a strong heartbeat, curling into a ball and hugging herself as she lies on her side on the bed. Gonou sits beside her helplessly, stethoscope dangling uselessly from his grip.

That evening, Gonou walks into the kitchen to find Kanan standing in front of the open cutlery drawer. Her eyes are blank. Dead. They only come alive when he pulls her away from the knives. They burn with hatred and disgust as she yells at him.

“Don’t touch me!” Gonou imagines he can hear the word _demon_ floating in the air between them.

Gonou refuses to leave Kanan alone. Half of his attention is always focused on her. He throws away all the medication in the house. He puts a lock on the cutlery drawer and the cabinet of cleaning supplies. He takes over all the cooking.

He stays up at night, looking at Kanan’s back, the curve of her spine, and feels like she had died in the dungeon anyway.

* * *

The first time Gonou sees him, they’re in the small convenience store in town.

The other customers treat him like he's a regular, exchanging laughter and small talk. Gonou wonders why he’d never seen the other man before, knows that he would never forget him if he had.

He has red hair and eyes.

Gonou wonders if the villagers know what they’re dealing with. Wonders if they know how casually they’re touching an abomination. It’s never occurred to him before this moment, but now Gonou can see just how much of an ignorant, backwater village this is. They don’t know anything about demons, don’t know that red hair and red eyes are a sign of half-breed monstrosities.

Gonou hurries to the cash register to pay, ends up almost running into the half-breed.

“Hey, man,” the half-breed says. “Watch where you’re going.”

Gonou mumbles an apology. He grabs his purchases as soon as the girl behind the register finishes bagging them up, practically throws his money at her and leaves without bothering to get his change.

He feels unclean, like his skin is covered in filth and insects. He knows he’s more demon than the half-breed is, but Gonou was _human_ once. He resists the urge to touch his limiters, walks home as quickly as he can without running.

Once he locks the front door behind him, he finally feels like he can breathe properly again. Gonou takes his time putting away some of the medical supplies he’d bought, does a quick tidying-up of the living room before he goes into the kitchen to make Kanan something light for dinner. He swallows down the apprehension that rises up in him when he hears her moving around in the bedroom.

Gonou arranges the bowls of rice and soup and vegetables and a glass of water on a tray. The bedroom door is ajar and he pauses for a moment before entering.

Kanan glares at him from where she’s immobilized on the bed, wrists tied to the headboard and ankles bound together. She makes an aborted lunge towards him, but all she manages to do is jerk against her bonds. Gonou frowns when he sees that her wrists have started to bleed from chafing against the rope.

“I made you your favorite,” Gonou says, trying to sound cheerful. He places the try on the bedside table, sits down beside Kanan.

Behind the strip of cloth that serves as a makeshift gag, Kanan snarls. When Gonou removes it, she snaps at his fingers, nearly bites one off.

He slaps her, then, the crack of his palm against her cheek hanging in the air between them. They stare at each other for a few seconds, and Gonou thinks he’s never seen her more beautiful than she is in this moment, angry and defiant, her chest heaving and color high on her cheeks.

He has to pin her to the bed to feed her. Gonou straddles the swollen mound of her stomach, not caring if he hurts the baby— _hoping_ that he hurts the parasite growing inside of Kanan—and pinches her nose shut. When she gasps for air, he pours the soup into her mouth, throws the bowl aside and uses his free hand to make sure she swallows and doesn’t spit it out.

He can’t let go of Kanan. He needs to make sure she stays alive, even if she doesn’t want to.

* * *

Gonou comes home one day to find Kanan with one hand free, clawing at the rope around her other wrist. Her free hand is bloody, the skin around the wrist gone where she’d pulled and pulled until the rope he’d used ripped it away from the flesh underneath.

He grabs her arm, fingers slipping on slick blood. “Kanan, stop!” He straddles her prone form, pinning her to the bed, uses the leverage to keep her hand away from him so she can’t try to claw his eyes out like she had when he’d first tied her up.

“I wish you’d let me kill myself!” She screams so forcefully that flecks of spittle land on the lens of Gonou’s eyeglasses. “ _I wish you’d never found me in that hellhole!_ ”

Crouching above Kanan, his nostrils flare at the scent of her blood. Gonou can feel the energy thrumming through his veins. It makes him feel like his skin’s too small for his body. His hand twitches towards the limiters on his ear before he can stop himself.

Kanan notices. She stills beneath him, manages to look revolted and aloof at the same time, as if Gonou is a bug she came across but can’t be bothered to actually kill.

“Go on,” she says. “You’re no better than the demons who fucked this monster into me anyway.”

Gonou knows what she’s doing. She’s trying to get him mad, trying to rile him up to the point that he kills her just to make her shut up.

“Take them off. It’s not like you can get me _more_ pregnant.”

It almost works.

Instead, Gonou gets off the bed, leaves the bedroom. He sits in the living room, with all the lights in the house turned off. He can hear Kanan screaming curses at him, their old village, and the entirety of demonkind.

It starts raining. The lightning outside the window is reflected, for a brief moment, in the limiters Gonou cups in his palm.

* * *

“Mrs. Xu’s been looking for you again,” Gonou says conversationally. “I told her that you’re always tired nowadays because of the baby.” He pauses for a moment, fiddling with the bowl of food in his hands. “It’ll be gone soon. Don’t worry.”

Kanan is quiet as she stares at the ceiling. Her eyes are glazed from the drugs and it pains Gonou to see them so blank—he would have prefered to see them filled with hate because that means she’s still alive, still _Kanan_ —but she keeps fighting him if he doesn’t put the medicine in her food and drinks. She keeps trying to hurt herself.

“You’re only a couple of months away from your due date. After it comes out, I’ll take care of it.” Gonou spoons some broth into Kanan’s slack mouth, watches her throat work as she swallows it.

So many things can go wrong during childbirth. An umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. The baby coming out feet-first. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Gonou and Kanan would have to act suitably devastated, of course. They would mourn their precious child, put on a brave face for the sympathetic villagers as they went about their lives. What’s important is that Kanan makes it through this pregnancy; they can always try again, after all.

* * *

“Gonou!” Kanan sobs. “Save me! They’re here again, Gonou. No, no don’t touch me—Gonou, please, where are you—”

Gonou pictures what Kanan looks like right now. She’s probably terrified, pale, and shaking. Eyes wide but unfocused, seeing something only visible to her.

“Oh, god, I can feel it moving inside of me.” Kanan’s voice is a horrified whisper. Gonou’s heightened senses mean he can still hear it. “I don’t want it inside of me. It’s eating me from the inside.”

He’s never been more grateful that they decided to buy a house far away from any neighbors, nearer to the forest than the village proper.

“Gonou, there’s something wrong with our baby, it has too many legs. _Why does it have so many legs_ —”

Outside, in the hallway, Gonou presses his hands over his ears.

* * *

When Kanan finally gives birth, Gonou is useless.

He stands at the foot of the bed, eyes darting around the room wildly, as she screams in pain and frustration. Her legs are spread open, feet planted firmly on the mattress as she pushes, face red with exertion and shiny with sweat.

The sheets beneath Kanan are soaked with her water and blood. Too much blood. Gonou can’t bring himself to look at the apex of her thighs. The sound of ripping flesh reaches his ears, sounding oddly distant even though he’s standing less than three feet from the bed.

 _That was her perineum_ , he thinks distantly, remembering all those hours spent researching pregnancy and childbirth. _Her perineum just got torn._

The sounds that are coming out of Kanan’s throat are wordless animal screams. Gonou had untied her legs, but her wrists are still bound to the slats of the headboard and she strains against them, attempting to curl up into herself.

Gonou’s mind ticks through a list of things he should be preparing—should have prepared—for the birth and the aftermath. He doesn’t get any of them. He doesn’t want to help the baby live. Even now he’s praying for it die, praying that it comes out stillborn.

Kanan gives out last push, one last scream, before the baby comes sliding out onto the filthy sheets. Kanan collapses back onto the bed, exhausted, panting, eyes closed.

Gonou finally snaps into motion, grabbing the blanket he’d put aside earlier and stepping towards the bed.

In the few seconds it takes him to cut the umbilical cord, Gonou sees the baby. It’s a healthy-looking, round-cheeked girl. Gonou wraps her in the blanket, tight, wraps another layer around her, tighter until he’s sure that she can’t breathe through the fabric. The bundle looks deceptively small as he puts in on the floor.

Gonou moves to the side of the bed, sits down beside Kanan to tell her that it’s over.

Kanan’s not breathing either.

* * *

It starts drizzling while Gonou is digging a grave for Kanan. As he carefully lowers her body into the hole, the drizzle turns into a torrential downpour. Gonou shovels mud into the hole instead of dirt.

When he’s done, he looks at the bundle by his feet. He can barely see it through the raindrops on his eyeglasses. For a horrible moment, he thinks he sees it squirming.

Gonou doesn’t want to exert the effort needed to dig another grave for the thing, but he needs to get rid of the evidence. There’s no way he can bury it beside Kanan, and that means he has to walk deeper into the forest, in the rain. His aching body protests at the mere thought. He wants to cry.

Somewhere to his left, the underbrush rustles. Gonou whips around, hands gripping his shovel, ready to defend himself. A yellow pair of animal eyes stares back at him.

Gonou makes his decision. He nudges the wrapped bundle in the direction of the animal then backs away slowly. He doesn’t stop until he can’t see the bundle anymore, can’t see the tree that he decided to bury Kanan beneath.

Even with the rain, Gonou can hear the animal eating.

* * *

He’s tired and cold, but he needs to keep walking. He’d gotten lost in the forest, but he’s finally found the path that will take him back to the house. He’d also lost his shovel somewhere along the way, but he can always just buy a new one.

He takes another step, feels his legs wobble. His knees give out and he finds himself lying in the middle of the dirt path, mouth full of mud, eyeglasses on the ground just beyond his fingertips. Still, he can see the blurry shape of what appears to be a pair of feet standing in front of him.

Gonou smiles and closes his eyes.


End file.
